[M]y mother was living alone in a little apartment in Jamaica Long Island, working in the shoe factory, waiting for me to come home so I could keep her company and escort her to Radio City once a month. She had a tiny bedroom waiting for me, clean linen in the dresser, clean sheets in the bed. It was a relief after all the sleepingbags and bunks and railroad earth. It was another of the many opportunities she’d given me all her life to just stay home and write.

I always give her all my leftover pay. I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.

Kerouac proceeds to invite us into the inner circle of the beatniks and their experience of the city:

My friends and I in New York city have our own special way of having fun without having to spend much money and most important of all without having to be importuned by formalistic bores, such as, say, a swell evening at the mayor’s ball. — We dont have to shake hands and we don’t have to make appointments and we feel all right. — we sorta wander around like children. — We walk into parties and tell everybody what we’ve been doing and people think we’re showing off. — They say: “Oh look at the beatniks!”

He then offers a guided tour of a beatnik’s New York, full of Kerouac-isms (“Men do love bars and good bars should be loved”) and irreverent romance (“…some romantic heroes just in from Oklahoma with ambitions to end up yearning in the arms of some unpredictable sexy young blonde in a penthouse on the Empire State Building.”) One by one he sketches out some of Manhattan’s most iconic places and faces, then takes us to the crown jewel of tourist attraction and ogles it with equal parts cynicism and awe:

What’s Times Square doing there anyway? Might as well enjoy it. — Greatest city the world has ever seen. — Have they got a Times Square on Mars? What would the Blob do on Times Square? Or St. Francis?

Next, he turns to the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, “near the great Whelan’s drug store,” to echo the eternal New Yorker’s lament over the city’s ever-changing landscape:

Across the street you can see the ruins of New York already started — the Globe Hotel being torn down there, an empty tooth hole right on 44th Street — and the green McGraw-Hill building gaping up in the sky, higher than you believe — lonely all by itself down towards the Hudson River where freighters wait in the rain for their Montevideo limestone. —

The Five Spot on 5th Street and Bowery sometimes features Thelonious Monk on the piano and you go on there. If you know the proprietor you sit down at the table free with beer, but if you dont know him you can sneak in and stand by the ventilator and listen. Always crowded weekends. Monk cogitates with deadly abstraction, clonk, and makes a statement, huge foot beating delicately on the floor, head turned to one side, listening, entering the piano.

Lester Young played there just before he died and used to sit in the back kitchen between sets. My buddy poet Allen Ginsberg went back and got on his knees and asked him what he would do if an atom bomb fell on New York. Lester said he would break the window in Tiffany’s and get some jewels anyway. He also said, “what you doin’ on your knees?” not realizing he is a great hero of the beat generation and now enshrined. The Five Spot is darkly lit, has weird waiters, good music always, sometimes John “Train” Coltrane showers his rough notes for his big tenor horn all over the place. On weekends parties of well-dressed uptowners jam-pack the place talking continuously — nobody minds.

He then turns to the party scene of the underground artists, socialites, and literary types. One of them, Leroi Jones, who self-published Yugen Magazine “on a little cranky machine and everybody’s poems are in it,” Kerouac describes as a “historic publisher, secret hipster of the trade” — an early use of “hipster” at the dawn of its popular coinage. But then, true to the rebellious beat spirit, he urges:

Let’s get out of here, it’s too literary. — Let’s go get drunk on the Bowery or eat those long noodles and tea in glasses at Hong Fat’s in Chinatown. — What are we always eating for? Let’s walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and build up another appetite. — How about some Okra on Sands Street?

Shades of Hart Crane!

But the full vibrancy of Manhattan and its multitude of eccentric characters, the full range of the beatnik existence in the city that never sleeps, comes aglow under Kerouac’s gaze in the Village:

Ah, let’s go back to the Village and stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and watch the intellectuals go by. — AP reporters luring home to their basement apartments on Washington Square, lady editorialists with huge German police dogs breaking their chains, lonely dikes melting by, unknown experts on Sherlock Holmes with blue fingernails going up to their rooms to take scopolamine, a muscle-bound young man in a chap gray German suit explaining something weird to his fat girl friend, great editors leaning politely at the newsstand buying the early edition of the Times, great fat furniture movers out of 1910 Charlie Chaplin films coming home with great bags full of chop suey (feeding everybody), Picasso’s melancholy harlequin now owner of a print and frame shop musing on his wife and newborn child lifting up his finger for a taxi, rolypoly recording engineers rush in fur hats, girl artists down from Columbia with D.H. Lawrence problems picking up 50-year-old men, old men in the Kettle of Fish, and the melancholy spectre of New York Women’s prison that looms high and is folded in silence as the night itself — at sunset their windows look like oranges — poet e.e. cummings buying a package of cough drops in the shade of that monstrosity. — If it’s raining you can stand under the awning in front of Howard Johnson’s and watch the street from the other side.

Beatnik Angel Peter Orlovsky in the supermarket five doors away buying Uneeda Biscuits (late Friday night), ice cream, caviar, bacon, pretzels, sodapop, TV Guide, Vaseline, three toothbrushes, chocolate milk (dreaming of roast suckling pig), buying whole Idaho potatoes, raisin bread, wormy cabbage by mistake, and fresh-felt tomatoes and collecting purple stamps. — Then he goes home broke and dumps it all on the table, takes out a big book of Mayakovsky poems, turns on the 1949 television set to the horror movie, and goes to sleep.

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What a catalog of superficiality reveals about the complex inner worlds of young women.

On June 1, 1953, twenty women in the summer before their senior year of college were selected to travel to New York City from all over the United States to work for one month as guest editors of the college issue of Mademoiselle magazine. The young women had already been members of Mademoiselle’s College Board, feeding tips about college life to editors in New York “on frosted pink paper…the general effect was that you were corresponding with an older, very stylish, very sweet, and very pretty friend.”

'Six Girls in a Two Room Apartment in Greenwich Village, New York,' from LIFE Magazine, January 1954 (Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

In the early 1950s, the single girl living in the city was such a curious phenomenon that the merited a spread in LIFE Magazine, curious about how a young girl could possibly take care of herself at the age of twenty. An array of objects stands in for their hopes and dreams:

It’s a telling description of the Mademoiselle girl, a catalog of accomplishments and things, more suitcase than personality. In her application letter to Mademoiselle, Sylvia addressed her vocational skills: she was a “skilled” waitress, an “excellent” spinach-picker, a governess, a villanelle writer, and a “reasonably” good typist. Her first assignment was to interview the poet Elizabeth Bowen, (and for Sylvia to have her photograph taken while interviewing her). She was concerned about her appearance as she knew it was a powerful and creative force. For months before she left, she had collected “blouses of sheer nylon, straight gray skirts, tight black jerseys, and black heeled pumps.” She wore her very best outfit to interview Bowen, with pearls, gloves, and a hat.

One of the most confounding and exhausting parts of the experience was that the girls were both charged with creating a product — writing and editing an issue of Mademoiselle — and simultaneously living that product, showing up neatly pressed to cocktail parties, attending lingerie shows. That June was hot during the week, and it rained every weekend, but the pressure remained to appear dewy and fresh each morning. The month was a mania of seeing and being seen, where every girl expected to be both the model and the mind. The “Millie” guest editor was a member of the most glamorous finishing school of the day, in which the final product was shipped to young women all over the country.

Plath in a Mademoiselle photo shoot of the guest editors

June, 1953 may have been one of the most well-documented months in Sylvia Plath’s life, but she barely wrote about it in her diary. On the night of Friday, June 26, the girls celebrated their last night on the rooftop of the Barbizon, and Sylvia hauled up her suitcase and threw every last nylon, slip, skirt, and blouse off the roof. The next day, she borrowed a skirt and peasant top and, without a single item she brought with her to New York, took the train back home. There was no job after the month at Mademoiselle. Any girl who stayed in the city had likely been spotted by a model scout or hired by a fashion designer she had met during the monthlong gig.

That August, the college issue of Mademoiselle went on newsstands. It contained thirty-three advertisements for secretary schools, an article written by Sylvia about famous poets teaching on college campuses, a column by the inventor of the “Beat Generation” that claimed “careers are passé among young women” next to an add for blouses with French cuffs for career girls, ideas for dorm crafts, how to pin the perfect curl, and tips on finding the perfect Ivy League boyfriend.

The August 1953 college issue of Mademoiselle, which Sylvia Plath worked on.

The college girl, the career girl, and the wife each had their set of accessories, and the choices women had — to be an intellectual, a mother, an editor — were characters to play, not lives to live. That July, small tragedies compounded for Sylvia: a rejection from a fiction writing class, a boyfriend leaving for officer training, depression, electroshock therapy, and twenty-one days without sleep. On August 24, just as her issue was about to leave newsstands forever, Sylvia crawled into the basement of her house with a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills and made her first medically documented suicide attempt.

Pain, Parties, Work might at first appear like a frivolous account — a catalog of clothes, shoes, haircuts, suitcases, lunches, dates, parties, typewriters, letters, nylons, and men — but it allows that the banalities of the exterior life do affect the interior life, that madness, moods, and depth of feeling exist within the same world as morning coffee and an egg sandwich on the way to work. Most of the working women of Mademoiselle didn’t simply exist on a polar scale of benign beauties and basket cases, burning out their creative energies, but instead lived in that month the best anyone could, and moved on. Complement it with 18-year-old Plath’s meditation on life, death, hope, and happiness.

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“His knuckles are like golf balls and, when he shakes your hand, he envelops your wrist in lukewarm flesh.”

In 1961, 29-year-old Gay Talese penned New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (public library) — the most glorious portrait of Gotham’s vibrant life since E.B. White’s Here Is New York, the same obscure out-of-print gem that gave us Talese’s illustrated taxonomy of the social order of New York cats. What makes Talese’s writing characteristically sublime are the nuances with which he examines New York’s living fabric through fascinating characters like a seventy-year-old George Washington impersonator, a cat psychologist, a professional mourner paid to cry at funerals, and the city’s only chauffeur who has a chauffeur, portrayed not with the gawking censoriousness of a freak-show spectator but with the sensitive curiosity of a humanist. Among them is the tallest person in New York — a young man of great humor and humility, whose physical givens have tossed him into an amplified, tangible version of the psychological paradoxes of which most of us are woven.

The tallest man in New York, Edward Carmel, stands 8 feet 2 inches, weighs 475 pounds, eats like a horse, and lives in the Bronx. His knuckles are like golf balls and, when he shakes your hand, he envelops your wrist in lukewarm flesh. He pays $150 for each pair of shoes, $275 for each tailor-made suit, and sleeps at right angles on a seven-foot bed. At the movies he either sits or stands in the rear, or tries to get a front-row seat so he can extend his legs. He was born twenty-five years ago in Tel Aviv, and at birth weighed 15 pounds. At 11 years of age, he was a 6-footer; at 14, a 7-footer; at 18, an 8-footer. “I never recall being shorter than my father,” he says.

The father of the Tallest Man in New York, an insurance salesman, is 5 feet 6 inches. His mother is 5 feet 5 inches. But his great-grandfather, Emanuel, stood 7 feet 7 inches, and was billed The Tallest Rabbi in the World.

So far, Ed Carmel has earned his living from six sources, although his yearly income from all is probably less than $10,000. He has acted in monster movies, been hired as a Happy Clown, appeared as a wrestler, delivered deep-voiced radio commercials, played the “World’s Tallest Cowboy” in the Garden for Ringling Bros., and sold Mutual Funds. … In his latest film, The Head That Would Not Die, which did not win an Oscar, Ed played the Son of Frankenstein. In this picture he chewed on a doctor’s arm, hurled a half-naked girl over a table, burned down a house, and would have committed even more mayhem except, he said, “it was a low-budget film.”

“A year ago,” he said, “a wrestling promoter spotted me and they immediately billed me as ‘Eliezer Har Carmel — World’s Wrestling Champion from Israel.’ I’d never wrestled before I became champion. All they asked me to do was appear at some wrestling shows, strangle the ring announcer, make like a real lunatic, and watch as all the other wrestlers jumped out of my way. So I put in a few appearances, but never did get a match. I retired undefeated.

Ed Carmel came to America with his parents when he was three and a half. “My childhood,” he said, “was awfully, awfully rough.” He was the butt of jokes, was reticent in school and reclusive out of it.

[…]

After his graduation from Taft High School in 1954, he attended City College, where he acted in the dramatic group, wrote sports for the campus newspaper, ran for vice-president of his class — and won. “After two years at CCNY, I thought I could go out into the cold world and get a job as an announcer or actor,” he said. “So I quit school, but everywhere I went they asked, ‘What have you done?’ I tried out for the lead in the Broadway show, The Tall Story, which was about a basketball player, but I was too tall.”

The only employment he could find on television was in monster roles, and his acting lines thus far have consisted of a series of grunts and groans. If he gets any comfort at all from his life, it is perhaps in his conviction that it’s better to be very conspicuous in New York than not to be conspicuous at all. “In New York,” said the Tallest Man, “I feel I’m somebody. I feel I have to give an illusion of prosperity in the subway, that I can’t go out without wearing a suit and tie. I know that everybody I meet in New York is going to be attracted to me — or repelled by me — because of my size.”

The Tallest Man in New York has a wry smile, is extremely intelligent, and possesses a sense of humor dipped in vitriol. “New York,” he mused, “is an exciting town. Every day represents a new challenge — a new step forward on the road to getting an ulcer. In this city you’re invariably waiting for some son-of-a-bitch to call — and he doesn’t.”

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